Chapter 2: Into the Wastelands
Meridian smacked the zergling with his left hand and sent it, yelping, into the dirt. Before it could get up, he hosed it with a quarter clip of ammo, ripping it apart in a spray of red blood and fleshy chunks. Meridian moved his bulkily armored body to the side to allow McKay to hop down after him.
The Reaper fired twelve quick shots with one of his pistols and blew a zergling off its feet and twenty yards back through the air with blood spraying out of the bullet holes in its chest. Jack was the next person off, causing both Meridian and McKay to step aside and let the walking incendiary disaster pass. Jack turned and looked at them, obviously angry about something.
"Okay, seriously, this is gonna get old quick. Why do you guys keep on avoiding me?" the Firebat asked. "These tanks are armored and properly pressurized. I check my equipment thoroughly. It's not like I'm just gonna explode or something."
A hydralisk popped out of the ground twenty feet behind Jack and launched an acid-covered spike out of its chest. The super-heated bio-spike smashed through the armored fuel tank on Jack's back, de-pressurizing its proper pressurization with explosive results. Though Meridian and McKay were both out of the damaging range of the explosion itself, they didn't get out of it totally unscathed.
"God that's disgusting!" Meridian groaned as he wiped a lung off of his visor.
McKay started laughing at him until a piece of Jack's leg armor hit him in the head and knocked him off balance.
A Goliath lumbered up and put two rounds out of one of its auto cannons into the hydralisk, blowing the angry scythe-armed creature in two. A group of twenty zerglings rushed the mech and clambered up its sides, banging away with their arms and teeth on the steel armor.
"Mop 'em off!" a marine from one of the other dropships shouted.
Meridian aimed at a zergling and was about to fire when he heard a crack from next to him and saw the creature's head poof into goo. Looking down, he saw the ghost, Langley, holding her C-10 canister rifle to her shoulder.
"Am I in your way or something?" he asked, slightly annoyed.
"Yes, actually," she said, pivoting her rifle in line with his head. "You are."
Meridian threw himself to the side and she fired. The crack of a bullet breaking through carapace, and Meridian looked around to see another hydralisk, half its head hanging off from a bloody rope of sinew. The creature clunked to the ground and Meridian looked over at Langley.
"Thanks," he said.
"Not a problem," she replied and concentrated back on the swarmed Goliath.
Meridian rolled over and fired from a prone position, wiping the remaining zerglings off the two-legged machine in a controlled spray that emptied his clip.
"Goliath clear," the pilot said, over comms, before kicking an injured zergling like a football across the open field and up against a dropship, cracking the animal's spine.
"Dropships movin' out," said one of the dropship pilots as the row of big transport crafts started to lift off into the air. "Good luck, boys and girls!"
Meridian heard a marine shout out something incoherent in fright and turned to see a wave of mutalisks rushing through the sky right near the ground, stirring the leafless limbs of dead Tarsonian foliage in their downdraft.
"Engage!" shouted a Marine sergeant over the radio.
And the entire force did, sending countless thousands of projectiles into the oncoming wave. Mutalisks dropped like flies against the shear force of the onslaught. A good percentage, however, coughed up their glaive wurm payload, smashing through the sides of the retreating dropships and send them spiraling to the ground, smoke belching from their ruined hulls.
As the zerg formation turned in a high helix for another run at the ground troops, Meridian realized that they could take them out, but not without sustaining high casualties.
Thankfully, a wing of Wraith attack craft chose that moment to sweep in behind the mutalisks and hit them with every Gemini missile in their combined arsenal. The missiles smashed into the Zerg flyers and knocked them out of the sky in a brilliant show of gore and fireworks mixed in with a background of death shrieks from the dying aliens.
The ground troops whooped and hollered in victory as the Wraiths jetted overhead and arced back up into the sky to dock with the command ship in orbit.
Meridian dropped the clip out of his Impaler while McKay reloaded his dual pistols and Langley pulled another magazine out of her belt. In a symphony of clacks, the trio made themselves lethal again and prepared to move out on orders from, quite literally, above. Hunaker ran over in her white medic suit holding an Impaler.
"Where the hell'd you get that thing?" Meridian said.
"I took it off Houston. Didn't think he'd really need it anymore," she said with a shrug.
"Makes sense," McKay said.
"Damn straight it does," Hunaker said with a huff, "I don't want to get killed out here anymore than you do."
"Roll out!" a very confident voice said over the radio, instigating quick movement from the Marines, Firebats, Medics, Goliaths and Ghost in the field.